Field of the Invention
The invention is generally directed to natural-language interactions with a computer, and, more particularly, to methods and systems for effectively representing human thought in all its subtlety in stored data and processing the stored data in a manner on level with the human mind.
Description of the Related Art
For over forty years the goal of language understanding has been to work towards modeling the human mind in a computer. Developing a machine capable of understanding human thought and natural language has been a leading-edge objective of computer science since Alan Turing first proposed the Turing Test in 1950. Much has been written about HAL, the iconic character in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a 1968 science fiction film directed by Stanley Kubrick. Achieving this echelon is recognized as the holy grail of computer and cognitive science today.
Enormous investments of time and money have been committed to computer understanding. Intense efforts have resulted in schemes like Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), Cyc and IBM's current Watson project, which are still works in progress. After sixty years, this enterprise is well funded and ongoing, but it has proven to be a very difficult task. There is still is no clear roadmap. Language understanding is made difficult because the literal meaning of an utterance is very often not the intended meaning of that utterance. Any utterance has to be interpreted with many considerations in mind. Workers in the field generally acknowledge that there are still three breakthroughs required: breakthroughs in Knowledge Representation, breakthroughs in Natural Language Theory, and breakthroughs in Language Understanding Software.